Curtin University sacred Mural vanishes — The Nobel that wasn’t, is gone

Remember how Curtin University, in Perth Australia, put up a sacred Nobel Wall? We had so much fun with it. The mural deified a climate saint — Prof Richard Warrick — one of the numberless thousands who helped the IPCC win a peace prize for generating no peace. It appears the University was embarrassed about people pointing out that the mural implied Prof Warrick had earned a Nobel Peace Prize while the Nobel committee said he hadn’t.

Curtin University not only changed the web pages, but the mural has been removed. I would have thought they might just change the wording, but the whole climate theme is gone. Possibly the University felt some pain being mocked for the religious overtones.

Call this a small win. Thanks to AndrewWA who alerted me in comments. It shows sometimes it is worth sending polite letters, getting those embarassing photographs and writing those blogs. This mural below has been replaced with another mural entirely (see below).

The former mural on Curtin Universities wall.

As for the web pages, the official Curtin page was corrected. The bio page has evaporated? (I can’t see it at all, can you?)

From Feb 2014: “Warrick’s bio pages […]

It’s climate apostasy again: Institute for Policy Studies terminates skeptic who cares about Africans more than climate modelers

Caleb Rossiter

No dissent over any point allowed. There shall be no other God than Carbon Reduction and the holy climate models!

The religious climate cult followers have shunned a long term member for the sin of saying the unthinkable. Caleb Rossiter, masters in Mathematics, was a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies for 23 years until last month when he wrote these heinous lines in the Wall St Journal:

“I started to suspect that the climate-change data were dubious a decade ago while teaching statistics. Computer models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine the cause of the six-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature from 1980 to 2000 could not statistically separate fossil-fueled and natural trends.”

Furthermore, he out-greened the greens by actually caring about life expectancy of Africans.

His Wall Street Journal OpEd continued: “The left wants to stop industrialization—even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false.” He added: “Western policies seem more interested in carbon-dioxide levels than in life expectancy.”

“Each American accounts for 20 times the emissions of each African. We are not rationing our electricity. Why should Africa, which needs electricity […]

Marc Morano on Canadian TV: Americans are jealous of Abbott and Harper

In an interview with Ezra Levant on Sun News Canada, Marc Morano (Climate Depot) says: ‘I am jealous of the leadership of Canada & Australia. It is so sad being in America’ – ‘The rest of the world is abandoning carbon pricing as the U.S. is jumping right in’

It’s like two junior partners of the Anglosphere are rejecting the senior partner” — Ezra Levant

Watch Here.

Marc Morano talks about the nations winding back their carbon schemes and “laughing at us”. “Germany is going to more coal. Spain is abandoning green jobs, Europe is showing a lot of sense in this”.

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Did Gillard and Milne leave a booby trap in the carbon legislation?

Apparently, on May 31, Australia’s targets for emissions cuts tripled overnight.Who knew? Answer: Christine Milne and Julia Gillard.

Australia was aiming for a 5% cut by 2020, but it’s now become a cut of 18% by 2020. The Clean Energy Act of 2011 set that savage goal as a default target that popped into existence if the current government had not jumped through some arbitrary hoop — in this case by setting an emissions cap.

Most likely this is a non-event — presumably the current government can wipe out the carbon legislation after July 1, which depends on Clive Palmer, a coal magnate. (UPDATE: Last night Palmer said he’ll repeal the carbon tax). But even so, I wonder if there is a sting in the cost? Are there contracts that are tied to the target, so that compensation for removing it automatically tripled as well?

And if the tripling of the target is meaningless, why would anyone advertise their deception in sneaking it in?

Could it be Milne and Gillard see themselves as Gods come to save us (damn those stupid voters!). Milne seems positively pleased she was able to trick Australians. The voters may have voted to remove the […]

Australian BOM “neutral” adjustments increase minima trends up 50%

UPDATED, Ken has now finished the full tally of comparisons and the adjustments to minima increase trends by 47% . (Headline changed from 60% to 50% to reflect the shift.) See the new details of the last few stations at KensKingdom.

Billions of dollars, climate models, predictions, and hundreds of press releases depend on the BOM records of Australian temperatures. There were so many inconsistencies, inexplicable adjustments and errors that we put in a Senate request for the ANAO to audit the records. In response, to dodge the audit, the BOM dumped its HQ (“high quality”) dataset entirely, and established a new “best practise” ACORN dataset.

Independent volunteer auditors have been going through the ACORN records — thanks especially to Ken Stewart who is publishing his findings on his site as he works through the set. He’s analyzed 84 out of 104 sites, and finds that ACORN is just as bad as the HQ set. At Kenskingdom he shows that so far, the adjustments used to create the official Australian temperature record increase the warming trend by13% for maxima and a whopping 66% for minima. (Note the caveats in the conclusions below.)

The raw Australian data suggest the […]

It’s on: Abbott’s message to David Cameron “Join skeptics in Aust, Canada, NZ, and India”

The Australian PM wants Britain to join an anti-carbon pricing alliance with Canada, NZ and India

Tony Abbott, Australian PM, has been shaking hands with Stephen Harper, Canadian PM, saying “it’s like a family”. They are both skeptical of schemes that aim to change the weather through fake markets which don’t do much to reduce emissions, but do enrich financial houses, lawyers and bureaucrats. Harper has applauded Abbott before, now Abbott is returning the favor.

The message is aimed at David Cameron, British PM, who has been quite the friend of the greens — leaving a legacy of “collectivist, bat killing, bird chomping, property-rights-destroying wind farms”, as James Delingpole would say. But Cameron got savaged by the UKIP skeptics in the recent elections. Signing up with Obama won’t solve that headache.

Obama, meanwhile, is trying to swing momentum back to costly climate action with his aim to bypass congress and use an executive order to enforce a 30% cut in US emissions by 2030. He’s on his own. Even the Chinese are watering down expectations (see below). New Zealand abandoned Kyoto II and tied themselves to the lowest value carbon credits there are.

Sydney Morning Herald has the video

All […]

Surprise, West Antarctic volcano melts ice

Who would have thought? Antarctic volcanoes are hot after all. Having a volcano under an icesheet makes a difference, and some of the sea level rise blamed on CO2 is more likely to be because 1,000 °C lava is not far from sub-zero ice. Right now, according to scientist Dustin Schroeder and co, it is as if the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctic is sitting on a “stovetop burner”.[1]

Only last week I wondered if West Antarctic volcanoes had something to do with the Antarctic warming and pointed out this strange coincidence below where almost all the warming seems to occur over the volcanic area which is part of the hot “Pacific rim of fire”. I also wondered why some parts of the media don’t seem to mention the volcanoes. Wait and see if this story gets picked up. So far, Fox, and Business Insider have it.

“Using radar data from satellites in orbit, the researchers were able to figure out where these subglacial streams were too full to be explained by flow from upstream. The swollen streams revealed spots of unusually high melt, Schroeder said. Next, the researchers checked out the subglacial geology in the region and found that […]

Failure of Peer Review, meaningless statistical significance, needs fixing says Doctor & journal

Most of the results reported in peer reviewed literature in medicine are mere artefacts of poor methodology, despite being done to more exacting standards than climate studies. There are calls in the medical literature for all data to be made public and for higher P values to be required. (Yes please say skeptics everywhere). Miller and Young recommend that observational studies don’t be taken at all seriously until they are replicated at least once. That would have ruled out the original HockeyStick two times over.

Even the absolute best medical papers are wrong 20% of the time, but mere observational studies (like climate research) failed 80 – 100% of the time. These studies of papers demonstrate why anyone who waves the “Peer Review” red flag is in denial of the evidence — “Peer Review” is not part of the scientific method. It’s a form of argument from authority. A fallacy of reasoning is still a fallacy, no matter how many times it is repeated. Those who claim it is essential or rigorous are not scientists, no matter what their government-given title says.

GEN, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, May 1, 2014, Point of View

Are Medical Articles True on […]

Green climate pornography — cheer for the deaths of the heretics!

Whatever you do, don’t let those skeptics speak:

Cartoonist accidentally captures intellectual depth of greens

Adrian Raeside ,Victoria Times Colonist on June 4, 2014

Paul McRae was not impressed. Me, meh. It’s another dying publication which just alienated the half sane readers who haven’t already left. Bravo, eh. They whittle away at their base til they will only have teenage low-self-esteem green fans and a few old hippie die-hards left. Not a good business model.

A Letter in the Times Colonist June 5 re: Adrian Raeside cartoon, June 4.

“Does anybody find it ironic that Adrian Raeside’s cartoon gleefully depicting the death of a “climate-change denier” appears on the same page as Naomi Lakritz’s column on the murder of Dr. Mehdi Ali Qamar, motivated by the fact that he was an Ahmadi Muslim, a sect not recognized by the rest of Islam.

Can there be any doubt that climate activism has become the new religion…

Terry Sturgeon

 

@hockeyschtick

 

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Remarkable boost for immune systems after fasting

There’s a fascinating study out this week suggesting that if we fast for three or four days a couple of times a year we can regenerate white blood stem cells. Fasting cuts down the number of white blood cells during the fast, but afterwards they recover, and then some.

This new result comes from both mice and phase I clinical human trials. Probably in paleolithic times, famine or at least hungry days were a part of nearly everyone’s life. Many different philosophies and religions have fasting traditions. Apparently our genes are selected to deal with that, and being short of food makes the immune system do a kind of efficiency sweep. Perhaps access to unnaturally continuous food stops our stem cells from reactivating? Something to think about from Killjoy Jo. 😉 Yes, fasting is not exactly fun, but nor is cancer. For what it’s worth, the hard part of a fast is usually the start.

Obviously, consult your doc, do your own research, etc.

The NZ Herald

Fasting for three days can regenerate the entire immune system, even in the elderly, scientists have found in a breakthrough described as remarkable.

University of Southern California

Fasting triggers stem cell […]

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Are Australians more concerned about climate — or are Lowy polls loaded and misleading?

The new Lowy Poll has got some commentators arguing that climate fear is rising in Australia. What the survey actually shows is that 55% of Australian don’t want to spend money fighting climate change. The Lowy poll asked loaded questions, didn’t ask people to rank their concerns, and showed nearly everyone was critically worried about nearly everything. Was there a point?

Predictably, one small uptick is portrayed to pretend the climate religion is gaining momentum again.

The SMH leaps to say the climate of dread is heating up (they wish):

“In a striking shift in public opinion, 45% of Australians now see global warming as a ‘serious and pressing problem’, up 5 points since 2013 and 9 points since 2012. 63% of Australians say the government ‘should take a leadership role on reducing emissions’, while only 28% say ‘it should wait for an international consensus before acting’.” — Peter Hannam, Sydney Morning Herald.

How important is a 5 point shift? The survey was of 1,000 adults in Feb 2014. The margin of error is 3.1%.

Peter Hannam doesn’t mention that the level of concern is 22 points down on the high that was recorded in 2006 when 68% of […]

Are dead fish worth more than live person? Could be… Let’s ban fishing too.

Did you know you can change the weather by not eating deep sea fish? Me neither. But apparently fish and other marine life in the high seas contain $148 billion dollars worth of carbon dioxide. (The carbon price used, which includes mitigation costs, is apparently almost $100/tonne — a tad higher than the current EU carbon price of 5 Euro. The “price” was derived from a US govt agency, wouldn’t you know, not the free market.)

The high seas catch is worth a mere $16 billion and is only 1% of all fish caught. But it follows that either hungry people will have to pay a bit more for their fish, or fishermen will switch to take more fish from the low seas. Either that, or hungry people can just eat more rice, right? And it’s not like anyone cares about the protein content of poor people’s diets is it? (Look who made a hyperbolic fuss about a potential 5% reduction in the mineral content of rice by 2050.)

Lets think for a minute about how anyone would make a global oceanic ban work? Since people only catch deep sea fish for fun, I suppose we just ask them to […]

Cook scores 97% for incompetence on a meaningless consensus

John Cook’s 97% consensus paper was never going to tell us anything about climate science, so it does seem somewhat pointless to analyze the entrails. It was always a marketing ploy. If it had been done well it might have been useful as a proxy for government funding in science. But it wasn’t, so all we’re left with is some insight about the state of academic competence.

Finding a consensus should have been easy. After all, billions of dollars of funding has gone to find some evidence (any evidence) that CO2 causes a crisis, and entire research departments have been set up to produce papers to discuss that. And if they didn’t find evidence (they didn’t), they could still write papers discussing the bias of instruments, the error bars, the adjustments, and so on and so forth. What are the chances that hordes of scientists would not find anything to publish? We also know that while believers were being employed left, far-left, and center, quite a few skeptics were sacked. Sometimes skeptical papers got delayed by up to two years, while there was usually a rapid-print option for believers. Once, a whole journal was even shut down for publishing skeptical […]

Obama Rule by Decree: If you like Your Lifestyle — You can keep your lifestyle…

How many people will die in order to reduce world temperatures by possibly, maybe, something a lot less than 0.05 F? Commiserations to the people of the USA.

Obama said almost nothing about climate change in the 2012 election campaign. Ain’t that the way? He can’t persuade the people to take the medicine they don’t need. Congress won’t pass it, so he’s going around the voters entirely and doing it through EPA regulations.

Rothbard and Rucker look at the toll of Obama’s EPA plan to slash CO2 emissions by a pointless 30%:

224,000 more lost jobs every year (U.S. Chamber of Commerce figures). Cost to every American household $3,400 per year (U.S. Chamber of Commerce figures).

What’s the point of electing a congress if the President rules by executive order ?

“Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., went so far as to describe it as an unconstitutional power grab.”

— Jo

——————————————————

EPA’s next wave of job-killing CO2 regulations

Unleashing EPA bureaucrats on American livelihoods, living standards and liberties

David Rothbard and Craig Rucker [CFACT]

Supported by nothing but assumptions, faulty computer models and outright falsifications of what is […]

Climate science hopelessly politicized. Geological Society of Australia gives up on making any statement

So much for the consensus. In 2012 The Geological Society of Australia (GSA) was one of the few associations to make a slightly skeptical position on climate. For poking their heads above the parapet they’ve had years of headache and debate, and finally have issued a statement saying they have given up entirely on putting out any statement. The debate is so furious and divisive that no position could be agreed on. (I wonder exactly how many of their members are fans of climate models? Was this the work of just a few zealous believers?) I think I’ve hardly ever met a geologist who wasn’t somewhat skeptical.

The back story is that, like most science associations, in 2009 the GSA chanted the litany. (Their 2009 statement is here). They wrote that governments should take strong action to reduce CO2 and that meant paying geologists more to do research and sit on plum advisory committees. How predictable…

1. That strong action be taken at all levels, including government, industry, and individuals to substantially reduce the current levels of greenhouse gas emissions and to mitigate the likely social and environmental effects of increasing atmospheric CO2.

2. That Earth Scientists with appropriate expertise […]

Mass carbon emissions, yet Australian sea levels rise at similar speed as 1920 – 1950

Australia is one of the most stable land masses on the planet, and has more gauges than anywhere else in the southern hemisphere, so it’s very useful for sea-level measurements. It also had a couple of rare continuous long records “… the two longest sea-level records in the southern hemisphere, Sydney Fort Denison from 1886 and Fremantle from 1897″ .

A new paper by White et al, concludes that Australian sea level rises are similar to global measurements (so not a bad proxy for the world), and that during times when CO2 levels were much lower — like before World War II, sea levels were rising at the same speed (or possibly faster) than they are today.

A generalized additive model of Australia’s two longest records (Fremantle and Sydney) reveals the presence of both linear and non-linear long-term sea-level trends, with both records showing larger rates of rise between 1920 and 1950, relatively stable mean sea levels between 1960 and 1990 and an increased rate of rise from the early 1990s.

Does a “larger rate of rise” mean larger than today, or larger than average — I think, given the error margins, that we could only be sure it […]

Obama tries to change the weather by burning US jobs

Bad news for the environment. Obama has a plan.

Obama’s power plant rule leaked: EPA seeks 30 percent reduction in emissions

The proposal will aim for a 30 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2030, according to the WSJ

The Obama administration is set to announce its draft proposal to cut carbon emissions from existing power plants at 10:30 am ET Monday morning, but the Wall Street Journal claims to have the early scoop on the basics.

The Environmental Protection Agency is seeking a 30 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 from existing power plants based on emission levels from 2005, “two people who have been briefed on the rule” told the WSJ. That’s considerably higher than the 20 percent cut that had been predicted – although, because CO2 emissions have already been on the decline in recent years, not as stringent as it would have been should the administration chosen 2010 or 2012 as a baseline. The EPA refused to comment before tomorrow’s release. [read more]

 

I’m sure China, Brazil and India are grateful…

Source UNEP

Source: UNEP

American ingenuity may yet win the day despite the pointless ball and chain.

 

..

Then […]

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Litchfield National Park, Northern Territory, Australia | Photo Jo Nova

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